


The Space Between

by nyagosstar



Series: Bitter 'verse [12]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 17:27:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyagosstar/pseuds/nyagosstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you do on a lazy day off when you suck at relaxing?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space Between

**Author's Note:**

> This piece is part of the livejournal project twicetold. All thanks go to halfacorkfor pointing me in that direction and for listening to me whine about me not being done. Also, thanks as always to my rocking beta, sainnis who laughs when I'm funny, praises me when I do well and kicks my ass when I can do better.

“If the house was on fire and you could only save one thing, what would it be?” Ed turned his head in time to feel Roy’s soft puff of irritated breath.

“You know, I like it so much better when I’m the one who can’t sleep keeping you awake.”

“Whatever. Answer the question.”

“There’s a pretty big logical fallacy in your question. If the house was on fire, I’d put it out.” Roy snapped in the darkness and Ed could hear the smirk on his face.

“Your gloves were the first thing to go. Now pick.” Roy was horrible at these games. Ed didn’t know why he still tried to play them except it was late, he was tired, but couldn’t sleep and every time he closed his eyes all he could see was the Gate. It was almost enough to make him long for the endless nights shared in strange cities and backwards towns with Al, trapped in a steel body that never slept. Ed had no doubt that he could spend the rest of his life talking with Al every second of every day and never run out of things to say or games to play. With Roy, it sometimes seemed the only things they knew how do to were fuck and fight.

“I can still draw arrays.”

“Ha. You remember the array you made for Elysia last week? Good thing it wasn’t supposed to work. The outside ring was more like an oval and the lines looked like they’d been drawn by a palsied old man.”

“No one likes a showoff.”

Ed blinked up at the ceiling while his fingers idly traced arrays on the sheets. “You’re not getting out of this. What would you save?”

“Why do I think there’s no way I can answer this question correctly?”

“Because you’re paranoid after a lifetime of military service?”

“Fine. I’d save you, obviously.”

“I don’t need saving, asshole, because I’m not a child or a kitten stuck in a tree. Try again.” Like he couldn’t get himself out of a burning building.

Roy heaved out a long sigh. “God, you’re picky. Fine. Downstairs in the hallway there’s that picture that someone took of us at Al’s last birthday party. I’d want that.”

It was a lovely picture; they hadn’t even been aware anyone was taking it. Roy was laughing at something Ed had said and Ed was grinning up at him with an easy, warm smile. “You’re so lame,” he said fondly as he turned on his side. Roy moved in behind him and threw an arm across his waist. They usually slept on opposite ends of the bed—Roy was a violent sleeper and Ed put off enough heat to ignite them both—but Ed didn’t mind the closeness.

After a moment, Ed twined their fingers together and Roy pressed a kiss to the back of Ed’s neck. “Go to sleep.”

Ed closed his eyes, hoping a childish hope that Roy’s mere presence would be enough to let him sleep without dreams of blood.

***

“If you could pick someone you know or knew to knock to the ground, someone you never had the chance to hit, who would it be?”

It was funny to watch Roy pause, his fork halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“You heard me, who would you have put on the ground if you could have?” Ed had finished his own plate and was considering how much of Roy’s he could steal while he was distracted.

“I make you breakfast and you ask me weird questions?” He eyed Ed warily, and then curled a protective arm around his plate. “I don’t know.”

Ed stood and carried his plate to the sink, picking leftover bits of breakfast from the pan before turning around to lean against the counter. “Well, think about it. It’s an interesting question.”

“I really don’t know. You’re more the hitting type than me.” Roy finished the rest of his food in several quick bites before turning an accusing look on Ed. “You know, before you, I actually took time eating. I could spend half an hour enjoying a breakfast like this. Now, if I go longer than ten minutes, I risk losing everything to you.”

“It’s just something you have to do because your body tells you it needs energy. I don’t spend half an hour enjoying a breath when my lungs tell me it’s time to breathe.”

Roy sighed and rose to join his plate with Ed’s. “You don’t have to rush through everything anymore. You can take time to enjoy an excellent breakfast,”

“So modest,” Ed muttered as he began washing plates.

“And if you want to take an extra second to enjoy a breath, you can.”

Ed shrugged off Roy’s light touch to his shoulder. “You didn’t answer my question.”

This time, there was no hesitation in Roy’s answer. “Hohenheim.”

Ed let the pan fall from his fingers into the soapy water with a splash. “Do your own fucking dishes.”

***

“Do you think you’ll have that thing back together any time soon?”

Ed looked up from his sprawl on the floor, bits of the radio spread around him. His ire had cooled somewhat—just seeing Roy didn’t fill him with irrational anger. Spending a good part of the morning taking things apart and tinkering with them had helped. “Did you want it?”

Roy slumped onto the chair and peered over Ed’s shoulder at the mess. “I was hoping to listen to the afternoon program, yes.”

“Oh.” Ed thought about how much he’d undone and how quickly he’d be able to put everything back together. “You should have said. You might miss the first bit.”

“Can’t you just,” Roy clapped his hands. 

“I could, but I’m trying to make it better. I think, if I can switch the wiring here, maybe add a few circuits here and here, we might be able to pick up broadcasts from Drachma.” And really, clapping it together wouldn’t do anything to kill hours of the lazy afternoon. When his hands were busy, when his mind was focused on a task, he had less time to worry. Less time to ponder life’s imponderables. 

Roy poked at one of the screws, sending it spinning in a slow arc. “I’d settle for being able to listen to the local broadcasts.”

“Just because you can’t understand what they’re saying doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be cool for us to be able to pick them up.”

“I’ll see if I can’t work learning a new language into my copious free time.”

Ed turned to look at Roy over his shoulder. “I don’t see you doing anything today but sitting around bitching.”

“It takes some of us more than a day to get down a new language.”

“And I’m just saying that during this time you could have learned to say ‘hello’ and ‘where’s the bathroom’.”

Roy looked like he wanted to say more, but he stood instead. “Let me know when you’re finished.”

***

Ed found Roy outside, in the backyard, lying in the sun. His eyes were closed and it looked like he was napping, but for the slight smile that creased his face when Ed approached. “The yard looks like hell.” He nodded to the tall grass, the overgrown weeds and the sad state of the flowers lining the edge of the house.

“Maybe it’s time to call the yard boy?” Roy held out a hand, inviting Ed to sit next to him.

“I don’t like that kid. He leers.”

Roy shrugged, too languid to work up to a fight. “There’s quite a bit in this house that’s leer-worthy.” He waved a hand toward the street. “You didn’t like the one before because he was too slow.”

“It took him six fucking hours to mow the lawn. I could have plucked out all the grass with tweezers and been done faster.”

“If the next words out of your mouth are ‘kids these days.’ I’m calling your brother to come over immediately and mock you mercilessly.”

Ed leaned back on his hands, thrusting his chin up at the sky. “Al wouldn’t make fun of me. He’d have my back.”

“I think you underestimate the humor in you getting old.”

Ed smiled down at Roy, whose body had tensed as though waiting for some kind of retribution. “Sometimes I think I was born old.”

“That’s not true. I’ve heard stories. I know what you and Al got up to before everything.”

With a sigh, Ed relaxed back onto the ground, his arms crossed behind his head and his eyes closed against the sun. “You can say it, you know, and I won’t break. You can say before he left and my mother died and we broke the laws of nature to try and get her back. It’s what happened. There’s no denying it and not saying it doesn’t make it any better.”

Roy caressed his automail arm, a light sense of pressure along unresponsive steel. “Is it wrong of me to think that I wouldn’t have you any other way?”

No one, no one had ever thought of his automail as anything other than impressive machinery or ugly prosthetics. Before Roy, Ed himself had never seen them as anything more than useful, heavy and painful. For some reason, though, Roy liked them. He touched them without reservation as if they were just another part of Ed. “Not wrong. Weird, maybe.” He turned his head with a wicked grin. “What did you think of Al’s armor?”

“Oh, well you know me, raging pervert when it comes to all things metal.” Roy snorted, a slim smile on his face. “You’re disgusting.”

***

At times, like when Ed finished a book that made little to no sense and could have been more coherently written by a clever six year old, Ed thought he was wasting his time and his talent doing research and renting himself out to the military. Sure, it paid well, but was it really worth it when the new books on alchemy that were so damned popular were complete and total bullshit? He had the patience to sit down and read them; how much harder could it be to sit down and write them?

Edward Elric’s Alchemy Books for Children. Rule 1: Do as I say, not as I have done.

All right, so there was some inherent hypocrisy involved, but at least there would be some good quality information making its way to the people.

He snapped his book closed and set it on the shelf with the other books that left something to be desired. Even when they disappointed him, offended him or were outright wrong, Ed found he couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t throw them across the room in anger. All he could do was set them on his shelf of bad books and move on to the next.

Except sunset was nearing and the fading light left Ed feeling restless. As much as it was nice not to have to worry about work—unreturned phone calls, paperwork, and insane alchemists—Ed wasn’t really built for days off. He paced through the house, his uneven steps echoing off the smooth wooden floors as he searched for Roy, who wasn’t built for anything except days off.

He found him sprawled on the couch in the sitting room—and how weird was it that Ed even lived in a place that had a sitting room—reading the evening paper. Roy glanced up briefly at Ed’s entrance, offered a quirk of his lips in greeting and went back to his paper. Probably reading the comics.

“Shove over.” Ed maneuvered Roy’s legs out of the way and took his own place on the couch, pressed up against Roy’s side where he could peer at the paper. 

Roy jerked it away as if the pages contained state secrets. “I’m reading.”

“I can see that. I can read at the same time.”

Roy edged away. “It always ends up a stupid pissing contest to see who can get to the bottom of the page first.”

“Which I always win.”

“And I want to enjoy the paper.”

Part of the problem was that Ed really wasn’t that great at being alone, at doing anything alone. He and Al shared a room as children. Some of his fondest memories of the time after their mother died, but before they tried to bring her back were of lying on the floor, Al pressed close to his side, the two of them reading the same book. It meant they could talk about the concepts as soon as they came across them. As soon as they saw the words, they could discuss what it meant, what it could mean and if they could do it.

Always, always, always he’d had Al at his side reading. Doing it by himself made him feel lonely. Roy never liked to have company while he read. It was damn frustrating.

“What do you think of tattoos?”

Roy set the paper aside, an interested gleam in his eyes. “You thinking of getting one?”

“Yeah, cause I’m really into modifying my body more than it already is. No, I was thinking you. Something really tasteful, like my handprint on your ass.”

“Go away.” The paper snapped back in place.

“Come on. It’d only hurt for a little bit and then it’d be like you were carrying a piece of me with you all the time.”

Roy angled his body so the paper was a barrier between them. “Reading.”

“Yeah, but—“ One of the headlines on the page facing him caught Ed’s attention. “Huh.” He skimmed the article and gave a frustrated grunt when it ended with a notation to pick up the rest on another page. “Hey, can I have page twelve?”

“Ed—“

“How hard is it to give me one page? You can’t read the whole thing at the same time.” Maybe it was his tone, or it could have been Roy just wanting to be left alone, but he handed over the page without comment.

He grabbed a pair of scissors from the end table drawer and clipped the article before heading off to his office. As offices went, it was small, but serviceable. And more importantly it held odds and ends of things that might or might not be important. 

A lifetime of tracing arrays, of following research trails and tracking down leads had been formative in allowing Ed to see patterns as they were developing. Sometimes it meant he had file after file of newspaper articles and missing persons’ reports and witness statements that ultimately led to nothing. On occasion, though, it meant he had three separate reports of the deaths of a middle-aged family man, with a promising but not overly prominent job.

He collected the two other articles and consolidated them into a single file. Tomorrow, he could take them with him to his office and do a little more digging, see if there was anything left out of the public press releases. Maybe he could give Hughes a call and see if he’d heard anything. Even though he was a general, and not associated with Intelligence anymore, the man still knew more about what was going on in Amestris than any twenty people.

While part of him was tempted to go in now, start looking into what he could find, Ed knew tomorrow would be soon enough. It was late on a Sunday and he’d be lucky to get anyone on the phone, let alone speak with anyone in person. At his office, he could worry, but not much else.

***

On the front stoop, the sun had set and the neighborhood children were running in the last of the light, shrieking and chasing fireflies. Ed was content to sit with his hand outstretched and let them come to him. He’d like to blame it on the automail, something about the metal and the circuits, but the truth was that even as a child fireflies had come to him, landing on his shirt, catching in his hair until he was lit up like a festival.

The door opened behind him, the gust of wind sending the small insects fluttering away and Roy dropped down next to him, close but not touching in the warm evening air. Across the street, a general’s wife raised her hand in greeting, her white smile flashing even in the darkness. Roy, as a general, rated a greeting. Ed, who’d only been living in the house full-time for a couple months, still rated talk behind raised hands and uncomfortable glances.

“If something happened, if something bad happened and we had to run, to get out of Amestris, where would you want to go?”

Roy reached out and captured one of Ed’s returning fireflies. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

Ed laughed, startling the insects away. “No, it’s just a question.”

“What’s with the questions today?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Curious, I guess. I need things to keep me busy.”

“We should work on getting you hobbies that don’t include science or working for the military.”

Hobbies were for people who had time, who had nothing to fill the long hours of the day. There were still so many things left to learn, things that needed to be fixed. He had Roy, and dealing with him was a full-time job on its own, not to mention his goal of being Fuhrer. He had his brother, who was studying everything he could get his hands on about medicine and different types of alchemy, who still wanted to talk with Ed about his findings two or three times a day. He had reports and files and rumors of people who needed saving every second of every day. He didn’t have time for hobbies. “Whatever.”

“I’m serious. The only time you relax is when you’re sleeping and you’re hardly doing that anymore.” Roy took his hand, but kept his gaze on the darkening street. “We’re safe now. We’re all safe here. You can relax.”

“I don’t know how.” He’d hit the ground running at the age of ten and now, a decade later, he didn’t know how to stop running. To stop feeling like everything was impermanent, like everything would come crumbling down if he wasn’t always terribly vigilant.

Roy squeezed his hand with a deep breath that was cousin to a sigh. “You’re getting there.”

They sat in silence for a while as the fireflies gave up their nightly dance and the children made their way back indoors. The neighborhood quieted around them and the darkness deepened until Ed could almost believe that it was just the two of them and that everything else had disappeared, if just for a while.

“Areugo.” Roy’s voice made him jump.

“Huh?”

“I’d want to go to Areugo.”

“Why?” Ed didn’t know much about the country to the south; it had never sounded all that interesting to him.

Roy shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been. And I like the sound of it.”

Ed smiled and stood, pulling Roy up with him. “Come inside with me. I’m being eaten alive and my ass is numb from the stoop.”

“It wouldn’t matter where we went, you know,” Roy said as they stepped inside the house, the bright light momentarily blinding them.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you’d be with me.”

Ed rolled his eyes. “You’re such an unbelievable sap.” 

 


End file.
